By Andrew Waters, Commercial Business Manager at Newcastle Furniture Service

While the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns brought furniture poverty issues into sharp focus, the current cost-of-living crisis is exacerbating an already difficult situation for many social housing customers and their landlords.

When Your Homes Newcastle worked with HACT to produce a report into furniture poverty in 2020, we referenced Turn2Us’ Living Without report, which stated that 1.9 million people were living without cookers and 2.8 million without freezers. Now that the cost of energy has risen to unmanageable amounts for many of these people, even just feeding themselves and their families has become an inherently expensive task.

Our furniture rental scheme, Newcastle Furniture Service (NFS), has existed in some form for over 30 years; it’s never been needed more.

The NFS approach, rent – return – refurbish – reuse, aims to provide YHN customers and those of the other organisations we work with a high-quality service that helps to make their house a home, while at the same time reducing potentially negative impacts on their health and that of their finances.

Everyone who signs up as a YHN customer is informed about NFS so they can choose whether to rent furniture from us. We know that some customers aren’t aware that most social housing accommodation comes without even basic white goods, so we ensure there are no surprises in this regard and talk everyone through our affordable offer.

Our furniture packs are not pre-determined, rather they’re built around the specific needs of each customer and recognise that some people may already have one or two items but need support in accessing others. We work on a points system to determine cost, which is most often covered by housing benefit or universal credit.

At any point, should an item fall into disrepair, all the customer needs to do is contact us and we’ll repair or replace it for them. Many customers continue to rent their furniture from us for years and years, but this doesn’t mean they’ll have the same products for that period even if they remain in working order; we contact everyone before they’ve had a product for five years to provide cyclical replacements.

A recent BBC story highlighted that 1.2 million social housing customers are living without carpets due to a culture of ripping up flooring for hygiene purposes following a tenancy termination. End Furniture Poverty is, rightly, campaigning for social landlords to only do so when truly necessary to reduce the impact on those who can’t afford to replace them. YHN’s policy is to leave flooring in place whenever possible and NFS even provides large rugs as an affordable fall-back option.

This value-for-money approach works not only for our customers, but also for us and our clients as landlords – analysis of YHN residents using NFS found that those using the service had on average lower rent arrears in the region of £100 than those who weren’t on the service.

And with NFS operating 100% landfill avoidance, it’s good news for the environment too!

Andrew Waters is YHN’s commercial business manager and oversees the contracts YHN has to provide furniture to 35 other housing organisations. He can be reached via [email protected]